The Voices in Our Heads (23 page)

“That’s it?” Becky said. She’d been wringing her hands, and they were still twisted up, pushing the skirt down between her knees a bit. He put his hands toward his hips, knuckled one, and rested the other, oh so unconsciously, on the butt of his service revolver.

“Ma’am,” he said.

“Becky, please.”

“Professor,”
he corrected. Took a deep meaningful breath. “It’s cold outside.”

“No shit.”

“Pardon?” He was leaning in a bit now, eyes raised, the condescending Daddy. Becky flickered her glance away and back, muttering out the side of her mouth, “Sorry.”

His arms went to the stereotypical folding across the chest, and yes, he went up on his toes, the son of a bitch. He took a second to “gather his patience,” and gave a brief, distasteful glance around her small living room. Then back with the high-beam eyes.

“Look, ma’am. I got three accidents on Springfield Road and a jackknifed tractor trailer on City Line near the U-Haul place. A kid fell down at the skadium and another went missing three hours ago in the woods behind the high school. We have multiple reports of snowball peltings by teenagers, some of the things filled with rocks and batteries, and there’s been word that the power station might have a division on the fritz. I got trees down on five different side streets, twenty-odd call-ins for stalls, and I’m short-manned. And you want me to get excited over a guy out in a winter storm wearing a parka.”

“He followed me.”

“Can you prove it was the same guy?”

“I didn’t get close enough to dust for prints.”

Now both sets of knuckles curled on both hips, the lean forward,
and
the head cocked at a bit of an angle.

“The Hess was on my way here,
professor,
so I checked your story. Denny Hennassey says you caused a scene and tore out of there like a teenager making donuts in the high school parking lot. Says you almost hit his water container. That true?”

Becky could feel her face redden deep.

“This guy, this, Hennassey, was never there! I looked in the booth for help and I could see straight through that middle window to the cigarette rack.” She gave a crazy laugh. “Didn’t know anyone was dumb enough to smoke those things anymore.”

She searched his eyes and got lost in cold steel.

“Professor, Denny’s been working that booth for twenty-two years. Says you stomped around that lot like a lunatic.”

“He’s lying.”

“Is anything I just said untrue?”

To her horror, Becky realized she was playing with her hands more overtly now, knotting up her fingers just as she had as a girl, there’s the church—there’s the steeple—look inside—there’s all the people, she couldn’t help it. She broke up the affair and actually shook it all out, looking at the officer, half laughing at herself, wanting him to join in with it.

“Look,” she said finally, hands resting on her knees curled and awkward. “If this invisible counter-man saw me, through some other window or from around the corner to the men’s room, I certainly did not see him. Concerned? Yes. Crazy woman? No indeed. And you’re telling me he didn’t see the giant in the parka coming across the street?”

“That’s right.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s how my report’s going to read.” He winked coldly. “Unless you want me to issue you a citation for disturbing the peace in a deserted gas station parking area.”

He turned to go. Got to the door and gave a half-pivot of the head.

“Think I’ll go out to the squad car and have a Marlboro, if it’s all the same to you. Professor.”

She didn’t walk him out. At least she had that to hold on to.

The shower felt good because she’d turned it on so hot, and was an anger-shower, and she didn’t want to primp, condition, or think, just scour. When she was done, her skin was raw and tingling, and the room was so misted there was condensation inside the framed Donald Duck cell she’d bought at Disney so many years ago now that she’d barely come to notice it anymore. But the haze in there made her think of the window in her office, and the sleet running down in furrows revealing nothing behind the oak tree out there. Right, and there was nothing behind the Goodwill Box either, nothing standing in the middle of Route 1, nothing advancing to the near curb, and students
never
chose to argue rather than do the work, and men in positions of authority
never
took advantage of those too polite to demand service. And
that
wasn’t even it! What just happened downstairs was misogyny, plain and simple. It was an old cliché and she despised herself for flying the flag, but there it had been, right out in the open in her shitty little living room in the shitty little house she’d settled for. Becky cursed aloud, rubbed the wetness out of her ear extra hard, and gave the hair on the back of her neck a last brisk go-over.

She put on her cloth robe and thumped out into the hallway. She marched downstairs, checked the front and back doors, grabbed the cordless, and hit off the lights. If Bruce thought she was going to saddle up and make her way over there to spread her thighs for him at this point, he was insane. She suddenly felt horrible for Julie, especially since she’d never gotten the chocolate bar she hadn’t been expecting anyway, and she punched in Bruce’s number fully intending to entertain most of the conversation with her daughter. Then to hell with the dissertation she’d planned on restructuring all night, and to hell with Laure, the old putz. She’d snuggle up under her warm covers, enjoying the long blank stares of her wall-mounted Greek and African masks, her pictures of tree-climbing goats, her steel trash sculpture that looked like a robot in a Shakespearean pose, and then fuck ’em all, she’d get out her Mary Tyler Moore reruns and watch them past midnight. Maybe with some popcorn, kosher pickles, and green tea. Maybe she’d run with scissors. She got halfway up the stairs, numbers all punched in with the exception of the last “4,” and then she heard it.

Water dripping. Distinct. Steady, there was another, and it wasn’t a faucet-to-porcelain drip with that certain little “toink” or “plink” almost like an afterthought. This was a drip that splatted on wood.

Shit.

It was the roof again. There was a leak just inside the doorway to her walk-in closet at the end of the hall upstairs, which she had duct-taped up in there the best she could underneath the grate in the false ceiling until she got around to convincing the sellers to call and go get the boys back to better apply the tar coating they’d sworn they’d completed out there.

She walked heavily back down the stairs, through the living room, and into the kitchen where she pulled her cutlet knife out of the block. Had a forged tip; wouldn’t break off like the ones on the steak knives she’d tried. She smiled wryly. Bruce would have scolded her for never buying a toolbox, let alone the standard implements that would fill it up. But she hadn’t stripped those tight little Phillips cross-slots in the grate’s set screws yet, had she? Becky tromped back toward the stairs, the grin on her face withering. She didn’t appreciate his ridicule even if it was projected.

Since the screen on the cordless had long gone dark, Becky pressed the “off” button, hit “talk,” and got another dial tone. She felt like bitching, to tell the truth, and she had the area code punched in just after mounting the landing. Somewhere between deciding not to get the chair from the office until she’d given a preliminary assessment and trying to remember which side of the closet the light’s pull-string was on, Becky managed to punch in six more numbers, all but that last “4” again, and she opened the closet door and she screamed.

There in the archway he stood, a huge black shadow filling the void, and the phone tumbled out of her hands, the glow from its little square face cover spinning, bumping, then settling, coming up in a V-shape that cast the giant before her in a tilted wash of faint, sickly green.

Something snapped, and Becky went wild, jabbing the cutlet knife hard up into his dark face area rimmed by the parka hood, into his chest, into his throat. Somewhere, way off to the side it seemed, her common sense told her that he was wearing some kind of mask inside the hood, that her blade wasn’t penetrating the coat either, that he wasn’t fighting back or moving really, except to swing a bit backward like meat in a walk-in freezer.

For what seemed like an age she just kept stabbing, gashing, shrieking, and moaning.

Slowing. Stopping. Panting.

She reached in and turned on the light. There was a line coming out of the top of his hood, and the far upper end was a hook, curved over an exposed wooden beam in the ceiling just below the grate. She sat down hard. There was a space of about a foot and a half between the floor and his boots. A huge drop of moisture was gathering at the heel, melted snow from outside, a big old pregnant drop gaining ballast, the cordless there beside her casting little prisms in it.

Then it dripped to the hardwood floor beneath.

Splat.

There was no one in the suit. For a few seconds that seemed like hours, Becky had retained her position on the floor, both afraid to touch what seemed a suicide, and amazed that she had been able to commit what she thought at the time was murder, defensive or no. First she reached up and touched it. Then she shoved at it, went and got a chair from the office, took it down.

And now, of course, the biggest question was why, coming in just slightly ahead of who. Still, her fascination with the outfit, or rather the
contraption,
had gained a strange sort of priority there in Becky Buckingham’s upstairs hallway, where she’d laid the thing out under the harsh blare of the overhead bulb she’d finally flicked on.

She measured it again, just to be sure. Yep. Ten feet nine inches. Apparently, the boots were stilts, adding a foot and a half, and the hood (the “face”—a tightly woven, recessed cast-iron black mesh) wasn’t even where the operator would put his head. The peephole was in the top chest button, sort of like the Philly Phanatic or some of these other larger-than-life mascots or parade creatures.

Inside the right arm was a rod that manipulated the headpiece, and the forearms had inner gloves where the wearer would rest his hands. The outer wrists and gloves dangling so far down appeared to be rubber-filled.

But the most intriguing (and frightening) things were the many tatters in the material, those made prior to the episode here in her closet doorway. Becky remembered that when she’d stabbed the thing herself there had been no real penetration past the surface, just a firm sort of resistance; and here she saw that the chest and arms were riddled with rips and tears, and even a few bullet holes. She’d dug her fingers into one of the jagged fissures and concluded the jacket was lined with some sort of steel, like chain mail, bullet-proof army-type stuff.

She dragged the dirty thing into her bedroom. She put on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. She had to know.

When she slid her feet in and worked in her arms, she was amazed at the craft of this thing, how easy it was to fit inside, how well it balanced as you stood an odd two or three feet off the ground. Of course, there was a convenient inner zipper, and the minute she pulled it shut she noticed it, inside the enclosed face area with the peephole. She smelled girl. Oh yes, that was girl-sweat and perfume, and not just from one. There were a lot of girls in here, each of whom had left her scent, heavily, purposefully.

She looked in the mirror and a chill whispered across her shoulders.

She got it. She didn’t know if she liked it, but change sometimes wasn’t meant to tickle. And change she had, oh, there was no way of denying it. Faced with the darkest of literal and metaphorical monstrosities, she had gone and stabbed it right in the face. And the neck. And the heart. She’d been through the fire now, and though sobered, hardened, empowered, she felt a part of her, a part she loved dearly, die right there in front of her bedroom mirror.

She got out of the thing and walked down the hall. Got the cordless and dialed Bruce. When he came to the phone he sounded annoyed, and Becky matched his tone perfectly.

“Lawyer up,” she said. “We’re switching houses, and I’m keeping Julie. You can have the leaky roof, the Shakespeare sculpture, and the ugly fucking African masks.”

She hung up abruptly and dialed in Dr. Laure’s cell. The real work had begun.

The only question now was whether or not she would pass the baton.

One year later

They were all crammed in Courtney Coontz’s dorm room, and she was glad to have the company. College was hard, she missed her mother, and she hadn’t made too many friends. It was second semester already, and she was starting to panic. She had pale skin, a fairly large cheek mole she’d never quite come to terms with, stringy dark black hair she couldn’t get to “fluff out” no matter what conditioners she tried, and big breasts that looked nice yet were more of a pain to lug around than they were worth. From nowhere, it seemed, she’d developed a goofy, nervous laugh that people here tended to measure with distaste, and to top it all off, she kept the stuffed panda she adored in the closet because someone had scrawled “DORK” on its tummy in magic marker. Late last semester, Brittany Fletcher had spread the rumor that Courtney left a fish smell in the bathroom, and it had gone around the text gauntlet like wildfire. For a month people talked about her with smirks and called her “Tuna” in savage little stage whispers. Most girls treated her coldly, and the boys were just rude for the most part, loud as all hell, smoking and drinking and kicking soccer balls in the hallway and playing cards in the lounge. The guy above her bounced a basketball on the floor and kept her up until all hours, and she often found herself staring at nothing, listless and depressed. She’d met Missy Schindler in a reader’s club she’d joined, and Tim Richardson in the book store. He’d helped her find an elusive Psych 101 textbook and had talked to her with a smooth, easy warmth. And he had such pretty eyes! She thought he might even ask her out, but she was afraid he’d want to do it, like on the first date. She didn’t want to. She wasn’t ready. She didn’t want it to hurt.